


A Reaction, a Repudiation, a True Act of Self-Creation

by Secret_Pizza_Party



Category: Hell's Library
Genre: Archive of the Forgotten - Freeform, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Gen, Hell's Library - Freeform, Introspection, Library of the Unwritten - Freeform, M/M, Post-Canon, so is Hero, souls are messy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:27:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27459460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Secret_Pizza_Party/pseuds/Secret_Pizza_Party
Summary: Stories change.Details are lost, blurred, crushed together by the frequent handling of a retelling. A misprint, a missing page; an old narrative cut into new perspective with a fresh new introduction, or caged onto a new path by a tidy army of footnotes. Pieces are censored, facts withheld, aspects played up, until the shadow that falls from the new version has lost the shape of the old. Stories change; it is their nature.What is Hero's story, and how much of it is left up to him?
Relationships: Hero&Brevity, Hero&Claire, Hero/Rami
Comments: 5
Kudos: 8





	A Reaction, a Repudiation, a True Act of Self-Creation

Stories change.

Details are lost, blurred, crushed together by the frequent handling of a retelling. A misprint, a missing page; an old narrative cut into new perspective with a fresh new introduction, or caged onto a new path by a tidy army of footnotes. Pieces are censored, facts withheld, aspects played up, until the shadow that falls from the new version has lost the shape of the old. Stories change; it is their nature.

Hero tells himself the story of the Dust Wing, and everything that led to that place. He tells it over and over, turning it this way and that in search of the cohesive narrative that would tie it all together. There ought to have been a clue, somewhere, to recontextualize and make sense of the rest: the bloody knife, the misplaced footprint, the telltale heartbeat thrumming up through the floorboards. But it remains obstinately untidy, taunting him with its lack of resolution. He recites it in his head (plenty of room for extra embellishments there), whispers it to the volumes that he re-shelves, even tries, once, penning it into the logbook before converting the aborted attempt into a dry description of the Dust Wing itself-- _for posterity_ , he explains archly, when Brevity finds the entry. The course of events, truly, are wanting for a good editor.

When the glimmer of his own Hero-ic (ha) acts has ebbed, though, the story folds itself instead around the shape of absence. His own book, yes, and the certainties that belonged to it. But more than that. Brevity's inspiration, stolen and unusable and treasured. Rami's certainty of the world, fallen down in the ashes where his hopes of paradise have long lay. Claire's decades of cruel illusion, shattered, converting her from caretaker to jailer on this far side of the looking-glass. When Hero moves through the Library, through the Arcane Wing, to leave a cup of coffee beside an angelic elbow or to deposit a pile of research notes on the desk of his weary librarian, he tries not to tread on the ghosts these things have left behind.

And then sometimes the story is compressed down to a mere introduction, the opening lines of something more, the cue or clue to a greater understanding. So many mysteries wait to be unraveled: the fate of the Library's fractured souls, the very fabric of their being. The sanctity of the Unwritten Wing against the inevitable discovery of the powers of Hell. Rosia's existence, and his own. This will be a long story, only the first few halting words set down in stacks of books studied, arguments hashed out, discreet queries issued to other realms.

"We'll figure out what you are," Claire promises, hair unkempt, cheeks gone hollow. She is surely setting records for the marks of human exhaustion on an immortal soul. This story was hers, and so was he, before they each took on a life of their own. "We will make this _right_. All of it."

"We will make this _better_ ," he amends, and she nods, half-hearing: always another tome to ransack, another discreet research trip, another artifact to examine. A job scarcely begun, and no less intimidating for the eternity they have to address it. Perhaps more so.

A story is changed by the telling, and if anyone can surface on this particular sea of spilled ink and sorrow to breathe the fresh air of a better ending, it is Claire. But at some point, there must be a reckoning with the rising action that has already been set out. The idea that all old wrongs can be balanced out against a more just future does not fit into Hero's own personal canon. Some scars will never vanish unless the whole limb is lopped off--which is hardly an amendment in the direction of righteousness. The past cannot be unwritten; each new volume that is added only builds on and recontextualizes what has come before. Forgiveness may be given, yes, but never, _never_ , earned.

Each day Hero sees if he can slide the beautiful lie of perfect atonement a little farther out from underneath the foundations upon which Claire has balanced her new world. Before those foundations collapse and bury her with them. "Justice is patient," he insists; it has so often had to be, has it not? It will wait long enough for you to eat something, drink something, wash your face, comb your hair.

And sometimes, small sweet sometimes that he cannot deserve any more than Claire does her forgiveness, the story is stripped away to its bare bones. A single climactic moment. A turning point, or a breaking one. "I kissed you," he says to Rami, in the warm fragrant dark. The beginning of one chapter, the ending of another.

"Yes," Rami says back, always serious, a dangerous sort of simple that should never be mistaken for stupid. He is never reluctant to set a pillar of reassurance beneath teetering belief. He must have had to shore up his own so many times over the ages. "You did." And then there are more stories, short but never simple, all easy variations on the same theme: a series that has never yet grown tiresome in its repetition. Better things have come to worse people, Hero is certain, though he would be hard-pressed to name one offhand.

How crude to have all this and still want, or wonder about, _more_.

All things end, in time. Stories may change, but that implacable fact does not. Only let _sometimes_ last a while longer. Undeserved though it may be.

#

People change.

Lives don't start with once upon a time and they don't end with a happily ever after. Real life appends epilogue after epilogue, rarely willing to abandon a protagonist at the scene of a glorious victory nor, for that matter, on the brink of absolute catastrophe. The pages keep turning, sometimes fast, sometimes slow.

Hero picks through the pieces of who he was supposed to be and finds that not all of them have a space in the onerous jigsaw puzzle of himself. Which things pressed into him by the pen of his one-time creator are innate and enduring; which are as fleeting as a choice of font or the color of a cover? How much of this--this _personhood_ is hers, and how much is of his own making?

Perhaps he could change more, if he wanted to, leave more of her behind on the Dust Wing floor. If he wanted to. If. _If_. He doesn't think that is what he wants. That would only be a reaction, a repudiation. Not a true act of self-creation.

So what is left? The vanity, yes, that has failed to fade. When he looks in the mirror, he sees the scars before he sees the man. The dead muse left her marks, and even when Rami's big, careful hand finds his shoulder, the black lines show through in the spaces between his fingers. "They're part of you," Rami tells him. "A beautiful part." He's so earnest that Hero has never had the heart to correct him.

Cruelty for cruelty's sake is easier to let go of. There is no joy left in letting ink dry in Claire's favorite nib after she has gone through a particular annoying bout of self-recrimination, nor in letting the tea steep overlong when Brevity assigns him one or another of the Library's unending list of onerous errands. There is plenty of self-flagellation to go around; the external variety feels redundant, even tedious. It is a small joyful surprise to say ( _sometimes_ ; he no longer wishes to cut deep but the sharp edges linger) the thing that someone needs to hear instead of the thing they are afraid to. It is a gift he has not earned, to tell his librarian that he can mind the desk while she takes a moment's rest with the damsels and receive a weary smile in return. It is a grace he has not paid, to hold the hand of the woman he called warden and to have his own held in return, as they grope together for an understanding of who they are, what they have done, where they must go now.

Cruelty for necessity is another thing entirely, of course. He keeps it sheathed at his side, ready to draw upon at a moment's notice.

But there is one terrible thing that has somehow fallen by the wayside of his past: once upon a time, there was a man he loved, and lost, and for whom he would have burned the world to the ground. How did he forget to stoke the flames of that anger? Where did it go, when it died? It should have had a soul of its own, found its way to its own quiet afterlife. Sometimes that man seems real and sometimes nothing more than a snippet of secondhand conversation. Owen. His name was Owen. Hero marks that down in an underused corner of the logbook, which, he hopes, will not let him forget it, even if he lets himself.

People change, and with them, their impact on one another's lives, two plants with entangled roots growing toward new and different sources of light.

Here is something he will keep, for himself, a watermark pressed into every page: he is still _a bad man_. Villainy is an armor that he will never truly take off. A proper hero might struggle to choose, when challenged, between what he loves and what is right. There is no such conflict in Hero's heart; the idea that he should stay his hand, before it moves to hurt or kill or burn, if it lets those he cares for come to harm--that is anathema, the antithesis to all he understands.

If there is a way to be a bad man that an angel could love, he will be that man. If not, it is the bad that will have to stay. He cannot love--worse yet, he cannot _be_ loved--and lose that. He cannot find out whether another face will fade to tarnished oblivion when it turns away from him for good. Cannot; will not. It is the same thing. People change, but the bones stay the same.

People. Is he properly a _person_? Or merely a cast-off piece of one? A sliver of soul with delusions of grandeur. Well--not _only_ delusions. He is rather grand, when it comes down to it.

Still. He only ever had a piece of someone else's soul, to start with. What would even happen if he ever tried to part it further? Perhaps it will afford him a functional example of Zeno's paradox: an infinite splitting of soul from soul, halved and halved again. And perhaps it will leave him with rather less than that.

If he hadn't had this ragged bit of secondhand soul, perhaps he wouldn't he wanted to know so badly.

#

People change, because stories change, and what are we but the stories we tell ourselves over and over, every day, searching for the throughline that will carry us safely to the end?

We are not always _good_ stories, well-paced, cohesive. Sometimes the high notes come too fast and close together, a breathlessness of pain and grief and fear and rage: a burned chapter, a closed book, a lost boy, a fall, spilled ink and the smothering proximity of oblivion. Sometimes the tension draws out overlong, refusing the relief of its ending: a friend grinding herself away beneath the millstone of regret, a relationship balanced on the edge of a master swordsman's blade. The doubts, the questions, that have no resolution. Throwaways that should have been nothing more than red herrings in the hands of a skillful writer now outweigh their meaning; long threads that should bind the whole together instead fray into nothingness. Sometimes an ending comes too swiftly and leaves without satisfaction: the blossom of a young man's life torn early from its tender stem, a muse gone feral in a storm of soul-shards.

"I'm here," he says, when Brevity's sharp gaze goes muddled and distant, when the words she has been reading tear her away from the page and into her own private narrative of regret. "I'm here," he says, peeling Claire's fingers away from their death-grip on a pen. _I'm here_ , he says, with a hand passing briefly over Rami's shoulder or the backs of his knuckles, and this one he says without speaking, for fear of what else is stoppered up behind those words.

No, the stories are not always good, under-edited and over-edited into a snarled mess, plotlines forgotten and new characters thrown in pell-mell--but why should that matter? Aside from the odd autobiographer, no one being handed out prizes for having a tidy life story. If our stories bring _us_ comfort, if they cast a glimmer of understanding into a deep and painful darkness … mere _goodness_ does not get far, stacked against all that.

Hero accounts himself among the lucky, that his life has been sewn back together so many times without yet falling apart at the seams. While he has lost, the same as the others, the same as any--soul--he has gained, too, has he not? The gift of choice, not binary true-or-false but thrown wide open. A certain paralyzing freedom.

What good is freedom, if it goes unused?

Hero can't be good enough to keep what he has been given. There is no such thing as _enough_ , not with the past he's got and the coming eternity to measure it against. For however long he does hang onto it, he will take it and treasure it up against its inevitable end. Finite time is a gift and one day his story will pitch him unkindly around the curve of its next turn. One day, he will do or say the thing that sweeps aside the gazy curtain of forgetfulness that swaddles the others, and they will see him for what he really is. And what he is not. Maybe sooner, maybe later. For now, he is free to go, so he can stay. He is free to be who he chooses, so he can be what they need, as long as they'll let him. He is free to wonder ...

He is not his creator, but something in her gave rise to him, whatever he is now and however he has changed since that inception. That story is no longer his, but there are so many more stories, and a few of those, he feels he might lay a claim against. To make sense of his own. To see how much has changed and how much still might.

Maybe _sooner_ indeed.

A borrowed moment, out of sight deep in the stacks. An unused stack of index cards in an Brevity-bright array of neon colors, long abandoned in a drawer--proper paper might be more swiftly missed. The narrow spines of books at his back; they feel as if they're holding their breath along with him. A clicky ballpoint pen that Claire would despise on sight, but which has a satisfying weight, when held. (He has to admit the clicking itself holds some value as well, an idle vice for fingers that don't yet know what to do.

To create is human. Isn't it? Is that his new birthright? Humanity, however secondhand it may be come by, is not something that can be chosen or refused. Once he tries it on for size it will tear to nothing or it will stay, a second skin. His armor may have to grow a little, to keep its fit snug but not oppressive.

He licks his lips. The pen alights tentatively on the cardstock.

There will be no falling back upon the convention of a _once upon a time_ or _a dark and stormy night_. Such things might have been human once, but they have had the soul worn out of them for overuse. No rote recital here, no apish pantomime. If he is to try this, it will be an earnest effort.

His wrist curls, his fingers move. A smear of cheap blue ink. The pen scratches through the cardstock to his thigh; he's writing too hard, he'll spoil the paper entirely if he's not--

He's _writing_.

He's writing, some words drawn out swift and gleeful from the ink, some reluctant to part from the ball bearing. He's writing, and the terror and the momentum of that carry him away. Into ecstasy, and from there, into exhaustion. Much the same thing, in the end.

#

_"I'm here."_

He speaks without conscious thought, two small familiar words turning the lock between sleep and wakefulness. Claire kneels beside him, her fingers cold and dry on his face. "Good," she says, and smiles, a generous smile, a wounded one. "Right where you should be."

From behind her, Rami casts a solid shadow over them both; between the backlighting and Hero's smudged vision he cannot see the angel's face. Brevity, too, a pale shimmer of blue at his elbow. Gods, will he need reading glasses? A dreadful concept. That may truly strike the fatal blow to his vanity. But if he's to keep--

He remembers, belatedly, and snatches for the scattered cards. Claire has beaten him to it, though; not all of them, but enough. She runs her fingers over the over-elaborate, close-crowded letters without looking at them. Perhaps she can make them out from the deep indentations alone. "Brevity realized first. What was happening. What you were doing."

"I mean ... I didn't know, really. A flash of inspiration, here in the Library…" The blue shimmer ducks past Rami and resolves into Brevity's hunger-pained face. She looks so much like Claire, just then, a photo-negative of the self-same desire. The same jealousy, too, softened as it is with understanding. He has hurt them, not by his own hand, but with their own never-healed wounds; he might have supposed he would. He has the thing that they lack most dearly, even if he hasn't taken it from them himself.

His fingers squeeze a deep crease into the few cards that he's retrieved. He is, after all, _a bad man,_ and it seems his carefully-constructed determination to keep these people from harm was not built wide enough to protect them from him. There can be no perfect penance in any case, but he is not sure he would take it even if such a thing could exist. A certain small bitter pride curls up at the heart of this particular selfishness, and he will walk over the broken glass of all that he has ruined here and carry the shards every last step of the way, in the name of this small and terrifying miracle. Forgiveness cannot be earned, but other things may be. He waits for them to hate him as Claire draws the top card from the pile and considers it.

" _The king of foxes may love the prince of doves, but it is not in his nature to fly._ " Claire's gaze shifts from the card to the restless twitch of his fingers. "Allegory, Hero?"

"Farce, more likely." That feels a little too much like cruelty for cruelty's sake again. He struggles, not for the first time and not for the last, to set that aside. "It's nothing important."

"Not yet, maybe." Her thumb riffles the side of the stack. "Far be it from me to put eyes on a raw first draft unasked." She hands him the cards and he snatches them back. There is a moment where their eyes slide past each other, unable to meet. Some souls are on two different trajectories; parallel lines retreating into opposite infinities, despite their perfect symmetry. Or because of it.

Rami still hasn't said a bloody thing.

Claire's hand covers Hero's. "Will you let me see it?" she asks. "When it's ready? When you are?"

The question is a raw aching wound in her and she is asking him to lay hands on it, to heal or to tear it open deeper, neither of them know. As a kindness to them both, Hero retreats to familiar ground. "I'm not certain the Unwritten Wing is the appropriate place for words set to paper."

Brevity coughs. "There's some precedent, y'know. For interlibrary loans." The fingers of her right hand have been closed about the forearm of her left; she lets them slide aside, now, the twisted lines of ink showing shyly beneath the drape of her sleeve. "I want to see it too. If that's okay."

"We might need to request a renewal, if all three of us wish to enjoy it." Rami has gone down to one knee, gathering up the last few cards: some scrawled-upon, some still waiting for the whisper of ink. The jumbled pile looks hopelessly small in his hands when he holds it out to Hero. "I didn't know. Why didn't you tell me?"

_But you never would have--_

_I was afraid--_

_What am I to you? What will I be?_

_How could you ever--_

A touch of the internal editor, and these chapters close upon themselves, unwritten, contributing nothing to the sweep of the narrative. "I should have," Hero confesses, and accepts the solidity of Rami's arm as he pulls himself upright. The side of his writing hand has gone entirely blue where he has dragged it through the ink. Frankly humiliating in terms of penmanship, honestly.

"Yes," Rami agrees gravely. "I'm glad you are telling us now." He takes a solicitous look over Hero, a surreptitious touch of his elbow to make sure he is steady on his feet. "Fox gods and avatars are a common motif in human myths and religions. A few of them have learned stranger tricks than how to fly." Is that a wink? "I don't know of any such equivalent wherein a dove learns to dig its own den. But I think it would be premature to rule it out entirely."

A ribbing from an actual angel. How very unbiblical. (Now _there's_ a book in need of some stern revisions.)

A nudge from Brevity. The kettle will be boiling over by now, the tea waiting, and, yes, the coffee too, if it _must_. Something to eat, something to drink. Wash your face and for all the gods' sake, wash your _hands_. This is a Library, you know. The war is not lost for celebrating the battles won, or better yet, those avoided. The burden is not forgotten for the opportunity to shift its weight upon your shoulders. Love is not broken, for the occasional tug at the scar tissue it has forged over old wounds; though it may stretch in ways to which it is not accustomed. Change is not cruel, but it hurts too, sometimes, in its own ways.

We may be the stories we tell ourselves, but it is good, even necessary, to bring in a fresh eye or ear now and again. A little constructive criticism goes a long way.

###


End file.
